The Symposia, 1933 — 2003

1981: Organization of the Cytoplasm, Vol. XLVI

Organizer: James Watson

It is all too easy to take laboratory instruments
for granted. They sit on the bench or on the floor, dutifully
waiting to be put to work. Yet the whole scientific enterprise
could not exist without these metal, glass and plastic servants.
Occasionally, a specific piece of equipment becomes well-known–the
Waring Blendor–and sometimes a brand achieves the same status–there
is a generation of molecular biologists that thrills to the word
“Spinco”. The microscope in it modern form has been
with us for over 100 years, and is so associated with biology
that it is an icon for science as a whole. And yet, with modifications–phase
contrast, immunofluorescence, interference contrast and, most
recently, confocal microscopy–it continues to be a key tool
for thousands of biologists.

This Symposium is a tribute to the power
of the microscope, primarily the light microscope. In some ways
it hearkens back to the early days of the Symposia when biophysics
was a common theme. A glance at the figures shows that this topic
integrated microscopical, biophysical and biochemical techniques
to investigate cell structure. There were papers deducing structure
form the diffusion of macromolecules in the cytoplasm (30 years
earlier Francis Crick had used fragments of hematite) while almost

every paper had acrylamide gels of contractile and structural
proteins. But the Symposium went beyond the structure of the cytoplasm
to encompass the cell surface and its interactions with the cytoskeleton,
the nucleus and cell functions such as axonal flow that depend
on cytoskeletal elements. It was, as Bill Brinkley wrote in the
summary, “...the first major symposium in the 20th century
to embrace the topic of the cytoplasm as a holistic entity.”

One technique that caught Brinkley’s
eye was “video-enhanced-contrast-differential-interference-contrast”,
(or AVEC-DIC for short) from R. D. Allen et al. Brinkley recognized
how powerful this would be if it could be coupled with using fluorescent
markers in living cells. It was just four years later that Brinkley’s
wish came true and confocal microscopy was applied to living cells.